Discover the Power of Paragraphs

Kevin Pittman

Welcome!

Begin Presentation

Introduction

My Background

Senior Web Developer: Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal ArtsJoined the IAC two years agoPrimary goal was to rebuild all six school websites and dozen or so projectcenter sites

Implement core technical and branding standardsMake it easier for content managers to maintain their content

The "Holy Grail" Problem

Content managers want layout control!Drupal makes it dif8cult to grant layout control without full admin powerEven with full admin power, Drupal OOTB doesn't make custom layouts easyHow do you give content managers the right abilities?

The Catalyst

School of History and Sociology wanted a complex and 7exible layout systemSchool hired an outside vendor to develop their look-and-feel brandingVendor sent sample site built in Panels / Pages

Too complicated for the needs of the school

We needed dynamic layout control that any communications manager could use

Alternate Techniques Evaluated

Drupal Block System

Okay for one or two pages, but de:nitely doesn't scale up

Drupal Content Types

Okay for a handful of standard page layouts, but no @exible per-page control

CKEditor Widgets

Provide some functionality, but dif:cult to install and potentially fragile (alllayout stored in a single text area :eld)

More Alternatives

Panels / Pages

Requires additional Fieldable Panels Panes module.  Not sure if supports allfeatures of Paragraphs.User interface is very complicated, with content management buried deepdown.

Field Group

Only groups Celds visually – no internal control over actual data Celds

Field Collection

Something like an early ancestor to Paragraphs.  On the right track, but missingsome key features needed to do layout management

Introducing Paragraphs!

Paragraphs lets the administrator de1ne reusable layout "bundles"

A bundle is a collection of Drupal 1elds, but think of it as a content sectiontemplate

Using the provided Paragraph 1eld type, these sections can be added to anythingthat uses Drupal 1elds:

Content Types, Taxonomies, the User Pro1le, etc.

Sections are added and managed through the normal node editing interface usingstandard Drupal UI

Nothing new to learn!Sections are "opened" via AJAX, so editing is fast and easyStandard Drupal drag-and-drop ordering lets you quickly order sectionsPreviews let you see how a section will look before saving the page

The Real Power of Paragraphs

Any number and combination of bundles can be attached to a Paragraph 7eldBundles can be used in any Paragraph 7eld instance anywhere in your siteA bundle can contain a Paragraph 7eld, allowing for nested layers of bundlesIn short, Paragraphs gives you:

Flexible page layouts that can vary by page without changing Content Types

Demonstration

Paragraphs Caveats

No samples provided – must build everything from scratch.By itself, Paragraphs doesn't let you reuse content – only layouts.

But, with block reference and node block, you can easily reuse content.

For maximum usefulness, you have to do a lot of CSS coding to style your bundles.So, a bit of effort needed to get started, but once built out, pages are really easy tomaintain.

Paragraphs Reuse

How to build a reusable Paragraphs con5guration

Create a new module and put all of your custom CSS and JS in that moduleInstall the Bundle Copy (bundle_copy) moduleExport your Paragraph bundle con5gurations and build them into your module's.install 5leNote that some 5eld con5g settings are stored outside of standard 5eldcon5guration, so to automate setting them, you'll have to dig into the variablestable, extract the settings, and load them as part of your module's .install 5le

Slightly easier method

Install the Features (features) module and use it to export a feature containingyour Paragraphs bundlesAdd your custom CSS to the feature module that Features creates

Stability, Roadmap, and Footprint

Paragraphs development started in November of 2013 for Drupal 7Current Drupal 7 version is 1.0RC4, released in October of 2015Already has a working 1.0 Drupal 8 releaseOnly requires the Entity API (1.2+) for D7 or Entity Reference Revisions for D8

For More Information

http://webdev.iac.gatech.edu/dtpp/

Presentation Slides, Getting Started Guide, Resources